Alternate Contact: Bill Raisch, InterCEP Executive Director, 212.998.2287, william.raisch@nyu.edu
New York University’s International Center for Enterprise Preparedness (InterCEP) announced today that it has received a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop and implement new economic incentives to encourage businesses to become better prepared for emergencies of all kinds.
“This significant commitment by the Sloan Foundation to NYU and our InterCEP program will allow us to help address the critical need of business preparedness in case of a major emergency,” said NYU President John Sexton.
“Most businesses in the United States are poorly prepared for major emergencies, such as terrorist attacks, blackouts and natural disasters like the most recent series of hurricanes,” said InterCEP Director Bill Raisch. “With the majority of America’s workforce, and 85% of the critical infrastructure controlled by the private sector, this lack of preparedness places millions of lives and our economy in significant jeopardy.”
“We are actively working to change the economics of business preparedness,” according to Raisch. Practicing what he terms “active research,” InterCEP will work directly with stakeholders in the targeted areas of insurance benefits, legal safeguards, and rating and reporting agencies. “First, we will distill and communicate the existing case for preparedness. Then we will work with key stakeholders to produce new bottom-line incentives for businesses preparedness,” says Raisch. “By changing the basic economics, we intend to harness the ingenuity and efficiency of our business enterprises to protect lives and property while providing for the continuation of the firm itself.”
InterCEP’s strategy to develop such a “business case” is based on recommendations of the Federal 9/11 Commission, industry-specific roundtables and interviews, and feedback from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which provided funding for InterCEP’s planning stages.
Prior to serving as founding Director of InterCEP, Raisch served as advisor to the 9/11 Commission on private sector preparedness and as Chair of the Working Group on Private Sector Preparedness. After the Commission formally closed its doors in August of 2004, New York University established InterCEP to forward the Commission’s recommendations.
InterCEP, the nation’s only academic center dedicated to private sector preparedness, holds all-hazards business preparedness workshops in 21 U.S. cities. Its international outreach includes an upcoming 30-nation forum to address a global standard for emergency preparedness which has been requested by the International Standards Organization (ISO).
InterCEP is a program of the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response at New York University, a university-wide, cross-disciplinary center to improve preparedness and response capabilities to terrorist threats and catastrophic events. NYU CCPR is a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and its Office for Domestic Preparedness.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic nonprofit institution established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr., then President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation. The Foundation has targeted selected national issues, which include bioterrorism, and has funded such programs as the Ready.gov, a national public service advertising campaign to empower American preparedness.